Faglige nøgleord: Machine Learning, Public Health, Healthy Lifestyles
Oplæg tilgængeligt på: Engelsk og portugisisk
The global population and life expectancy are projected to increase; however, longer lives are not necessarily a synonym of healthier lives. Thus, it is becoming very important to study ways to achieve lifestyles that promote health by informing societies about effective and easy habits to implement in our daily lives.
My project is about assessing scientific-based paths to healthy lifestyles using Machine Learning techniques. In essence, I aim to study how different diets, physical activity and exposure to chemicals in day-to-day products influence our life span and, more importantly, how we can use this information to build our own healthy and long life.
I will start by explaining Machine Learning with some analogies and examples of its use in society - face recognition, how we get recommendations of videos or songs in the apps that we use... For this I will use menti (online voting/quiz) with some questions to engage students and have an idea of how much they know about the topic. I will then relate ML with my own project and how I am applying it to identifying important variables in our daily lives - which foods are beneficial/detrimental, which exercises have more correlation with good health... and how we can discover it!
In high school, I never had a passion regarding which job I wanted to have; I did a BSc in Biochemistry because at the time I was certain I wanted to contribute to improving people's quality of life through science. I understood I did not like laboratory oriented research and went abroad for a MSc in Chemical Biotechnology as it opened up the possibility of working in industry. During my MSc, I had the opportunity of exploring ML and discovered the potential that data science has in a society where digitalization and Big Data are growing fast. I then decided to go for a PhD that would combine my interest in healthcare with the newly discovered interest in ML. Apart from explaining my project and ML, I also aim to be an example that not everyone knows which path to take in university and how important it is to be informed and explore different fields.